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Liberty Ross has e-mailed to confirm she is willing to collaborate on a future SHOWstudio project, mooted to occur in April or May. Based on the live, adult video chats widely available on the web, Liberty will appear in a free ‘feature show’ in which there will be live video feed with real-time chat.

Just to say I got Nick's message today and am sorry it is taking me ages to call you, I do promise to ring as soon as we wake up! It's been hectic here but I would love to do the project, am glad to hear it is still on the cards.

I should be back 3rd week of Feb but we are just waiting on exact dates.

Speak in morn but my # here is *** *** *** ****,

Thanks xxx

With a working title of ‘LIBERTY DRESS-UP’, the project invites viewers to dress (or indeed undress) Liberty in the A/W ’05 collections to be unveiled in Paris at the end of February/start of March. Details on how to book your private one-on-one fashion show to follow.

With the restructuring of the site taking precedence in the studio, emphasis has been on the studio cams for changing entertainment. A webcam trained close up on Paul Bruty last week has convinced Nick Knight that there may be mileage in a daily menswear portrait: a kind of re-working of the ‘More Beautiful Women’, this time using male models. We have discussed the idea of doing a ‘month of men’ with Simon Foxton and he’s interested in pursuing it later in the spring.

Penny Martin, Paul Hetherington and Nick Knight have just met with Simon Foxton to go through the as yet untitled 30 men project. As it stands, the concept is that Simon will create a month of living tabeleaux that act as ‘living magazine pages’. 30 different men (a mixture of models, friends and street cast) will come into SHOWstudio, be groomed (hair and minimal make-up) and sat down at a waiting area in front of a webcam. Simon will style each in a separate outfit/look, with no mixing of brands. Accessories will be ‘stylists’ own’, thus each will be single-brand statement. The model will be able to take questions from SHOWstudio viewers, but how this is manifested on the site is yet unresolved. There is no working title as of yet.

Simon brought with him an array of portrait imagery from books and his famous sketchbooks full of tearsheets and ephemera to foreground his ideas and it was felt that emphasis should be made on the ‘seated’ nature of the portraits.

Simon Foxton has rung in to suggest ‘Sittings: 30 Men’ as a title. We think the Warholian deadpan seems fitting and so it’s fixed. I’ve also asked Simon to bring in some tearsheets that represent his 25 year career in image-making. Since the project is as much about Simon’s taste in styling as it is about the performances of the models, we’re planning a section of images and articles on Simon himself to preface all the activities.

Regarding the fashion, we hadn’t made the decision of whether to use current fashion that’s in the shops or future fashion that was shown at the Menswear shows in January (see Simon Foxton’s mail below). I’m imagining it’s more useful for viewers to see what they can’t access yet, so we’ve decided on A/W '05.

Dear Penny Agutter, A quick query I forgot to bring up today but is rather relevant, I am assuming we will be showcasing Fall/Winter 05-06 menswear in my piece as that is what is now available from PRs although I realise this will be somewhat previous. To shoot Spring/Summer 05, although more 'now' would be a logistical nightmare as it is already on sale. I just need to OK this with you so we're on the same page. Let me know your thoughts, Simon.

Simon Foxton has come in with a big box of paper that documents his career in tear sheets. In some cases, what he wouldn’t let us include was more telling than what he agreed to. Marc Lebon subsequently popped in and was surprised to find out that it was in fact Simon that styled his photo pastiche of Otto Dix's portrait of Sylvia von Harden. He'd always thought it was Judy Blame, but admitted there was a lot that he 'forgot' during the mid-80s...

Our task is now to dig up the credits for Simon's pictures and arrange them into an intelligible info section that also includes transcripts of what’s been written about him over the years. The casting sessions for ‘Sittings: 30 Men’ are scheduled to take place in the studio on Thursday 17 & Friday 18 March, using a new, interactive model card project that Ross Phillips has been working on.

Jonathan Kaye is currently discussing a number of editorial projects with Nick, so he is a natural choice to work on the womenswear for Liberty’s project. An issue likely to arise is that of her height: one of the strongest elements running throughout the A/W ’05 collections was a demure and ‘covered up’ appearance with a long and lean silhouette, as seen in the gowns at Rochas, Comme des Garcons and Lanvin. These tended to be extremely long, perhaps too long for 5’ 8" Liberty, so it may be a case of Jonathan calling in an additional pool of separates to the dresses for his other editorial work.

Melisa and Regina from the industrial design team at David Chipperfield Architects came in to measure up for the new workdesk David is to design for us.

I took them through the concept, which was initially inspired by the 'Join' desk system by french designers Ronan and Erwin Bouroullec, which I saw at the Vitra showroom last year. The notion is to unite all of SHOWstudio at a single workdesk. This is to visually reinforce the 'open access' idea behind our new site plans, by presenting the the work, the process –and now the team– as a single unity which can be seen and interacted with by webcam as part of the re-launched site.

Although the design is still on the drawing board, the idea is a 10 metre long monolithic block made from white Corian sections (a synthetic composite material) which is then welded seamlessly together on-site.

Futher drawings and pictures will be posted as soon as available.

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Last night we were subjected to a small power outage, which rather affected our development server and router. I had been applying some software updates at the time and the power out caused a disk error resulting in the corruption of some of the core system libraries. Unfortunately time has stopped me from getting a proper backup procedure in place before now and so I was left with an unusable and unrecoverable Linux server - and no Internet access for the studio just before Simon Foxton was to come in and do a casting which we had planned to present via the studio webcams.

So, a couple of attempted system installs, much hand wrangling, and a couple of kludges later, I've managed to get us up and running again. I'm not totally happy with the install - for some reason I can't get the DVD-R drive to work and so now can't do any backups - but I have to get back on with new site development so I'm going to have to run with it how it is and fix the problems later.

We are about to start the virtual casting for Simon Foxton’s project and are just awaiting him coming in to see the models. As Dorian Moore said, we weren’t able to show yesterday’s Model Cards owing to a technical blip, but those will be uploaded manually at the end of the day. Contents of today’s newswire as follows:

MODEL CARDS LIVE TODAY - 18 March, 12:00 - 17:00hrs GMT In preparation for a major menswear portrait project to be broadcast live on SHOWstudio throughout the month of April, Simon Foxton is in the studio this afternoon, casting London's finest male models.

Watch the proceedings unfold via the live studio cams and view each model's 'go-see' in a series of captivating video performances. Captured using Ross Phillips' fun interactive Model Card booth, each model's thirty second video audition is designed around the vital statistics detailed on a standard model card, creating a perfect resource for virtual casting.

'Modelcards' has its roots in a project I worked on a project in Fabrica (www.fabrica.it) for an exhibition at the museum of the moving image in New York (www.motmi.com) called DARE (www.fabrica.it/dare). I created two pieces for this exhibition, GRID and FACE. FACE allowed visitors to grab a snapshot of themselves and be added to the end of a sequence that showed everyone who had gone before. The images formed the artwork and people used this tool to create narrative sequences, dance moves and comedic gestures. When I moved to SHOW we took FACE and placed it into the front window at Liberty's department store which allowed 24 access and also recorded the images in portrait.

‘Modelcards' takes the simple, automated sequence from FACE but replaces the single snapshot with a 45 second video. A model steps into the booth and presses a button to begin. They must then check their appearance and position on camera. Once satisfied they can begin the recording in which they are prompted by a spoken voice to answer questions about their physical statistics. When the video has finished recording the model is then free to go and the videos are automatically uploaded to our site. Stylists and photographers are then able to view the models over the internet within minutes of them being recorded. While still retaining the basic information of a standard card the short video allows the model to convey some of their personality and attitude.

It's a project that's been kicking around on my computer for a while soit will be interesting for me to see it running and watch how people interact with it. Paul Bruty, our chief designer, has built a great housing for it which makes it much more pleasurable to use than sitting down at my computer. The arcade buttons are particularly sweet. The main problem we have at the moment is the sound quality as the room is very badly isolated but it should be sufficient for the first few run throughs.

Managed to grab Simon Foxton while he's in to get a quote for the 'mood board' of book images he brought in on 23 February for the pre-production meeting:

'These pictures are less to do with styling than the approach and how I'll set them up. I started by looking through portraits of men. What really stood out was the repetition of men sitting: it had a certain resonance. Something to do with the cropping as well, half-way down the leg. A picture I particularly like is the image of Basquiat; the distance he is from the camera, the intimacy. If it gets too far back, it feels like it's just recording something. If it's too close it becomes personal. That composition gives the right information and the right level of intimacy. Because a lot of the images are from the early twentieth century, there is a seriousness that I began to enjoy and I expect this will be reflected in the selection of the clothes.'

Images are now coming in from Simon to begin his image diary. This will document general preparations for the project; especially the process of researching the A/W ‘05 menswear collections and calling in the clothes for each day of the April webcast. Simon has rebuffed the SHOWstudio Picture Phone because he’d rather type the captions than text them. He claims that texting’s ‘well, too European’, but we suspect his texting thumb’s just not nimble enough.

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Martin Parr has promised a ‘quick and dirty’ (his words) shoot in which he will photograph Nick Knight at SHOWstudio tonight from 7pm GMT. Via the webcams, you will be able to watch Martin photographing Nick, who in turn will be photographing Erin for a new project based on the ‘pinpressions’ toy with Val Garland.

Shooting has now ceased; both Martin Parr and Erin O'Connor have now left the studio. They made four ‘pinpressions’ impressions of Erin’s face, which are now being set in resin by Nick Knight’s first assistant Jez Tozer, ready to be taken to Val for decoration. Martin’s photographs from the shoot will be printed in his forthcoming magazine, which will be printed to accompany his May exhibition at Bon Marché gallery in Paris and Rocket gallery in London.